Darkness

Some random bits scribbled by Jeremy Zawodny

Something odd happened. While at work I was editing a file on one
of my home computers when the connection suddenly stopped responding.
So I did some checking and found that both my cable and DSL
connections died at 6:40pm--at least that's what my monitoring told
me.

Figuring that could only mean a few things, all of them bad, I took
that as my signal to head home. So I did.

As, I was driving home this evening and for the second time this
week I ran into horrible traffic on Lawrence Expressway. The first
time was Tuesday morning. As I got closer to home (which took
forever), I realized two things. First, I was not going to be able to
reach the grocery store before they closed. Second, I noticed that
traffic lights were out. Apparently there was a big power outage and
the radio station I was listening
to didn't inform me of this. They're usually quite good about such
things.

When I tried to turn onto my street from Lawrence I noticed that I
couldn't. There was a very smashed up car, a fire truck, and three
police cars in the way. Ah! The power outage was caused by some
moron running into the pole at the end of my street.

Wonderful.

So I took the long way. I spent some time throwing out junk mail,
cleaning up, and making sure I knew where the candles were. Then I
decided to walk to the functioning ATM (the power was fine on the
south side of Homestead Ave, but the north side was dead) to deposit
several checks that I've been meaning to do something with.

Heading home from there, I noticed that power had been restored.
Yeay! No spoiled food in the fridge.

I grabbed a drink of water and some yogurt and prepared to work on
some stuff while a movie played as background noise. Except that 5
minutes into this little exercise, the power died again. It's still
off. And it's quite dark outside, since it's 9pm.

With several candles lit and little else to do, I figured I'd write
a blog entry while I still have some battery life in the laptop.

It's times like this that I wonder why the big power transformers
sit on the busy road rather than a side street where they're far less
prone to being attached by rouge vehicles.

Of course, I know why. But that won't make my lights come on any
sooner.

Grr.

Update: At 9:30pm I got power back. But it seems that
everything across the street is still dark. Hmm.

If you run servers on your home DSL connection, this is why you need to remember to set the BIOS to boot authomatically after a power loss. It's a lot faster than running home to turn it back on. Only took me one power loss to remember that. :)

Of course, who would keep anything "critical" on a server at home?

Anyway, relying on what are typically government enforced monopolies (power companies) to care about minor details like "customers with no power", enough to take pro-active steps to avoid it, is like relying on the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button. Sure, I guess you'll get lucky sometimes...

on August 9, 2003 11:19 AM

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